Archive for Travels

Full night never fully descends in June upon Canada’s Far North Yukon Territory. I set off alone to canoe from Quiet Lake near Whitehorse, down the Little Salmon River to the Big Salmon, and then on to the mighty Yukon that flows across Alaska to the sea. In former lives I might have been a Swahili warrior in Africa, a Bedouin on the Sahara, an Eskimo in the Arctic, a Cheyenne brave on the Great Plains… I have traveled by dogsled, horse, ox cart, boat, donkey, camel, on foot, or on bicycle into some of the most remote deserts, mountains, seas, and forests on the planet.

I never feel alone. The Wild Kingdom is well populated.

From Quiet Lake, I plummeted down white water rapids in a narrows on the Little Salmon and surprised a cow moose with her head lowered to drink. I passed almost underneath her nose. I could have touched her with my paddle. Calmly, she watched me, her head following my progress until I rounded the bend out of sight.

A large black boar bear was harvesting grubs from beneath a decayed log on the river bank. I nosed my canoe ashore not ten feet away.

“Br’r Bear, do you mind if I take your picture?”

He didn’t. I think he smiled for his portrait, but I couldn’t be sure.

Young bears are curious animals. Whenever I pitched my tent to sleep, they came to pay their respects. Finally, in order to sleep at all, I repaid their curiosity by shouting and throwing rocks at them to drive them away.

During one of my hikes off the river to explore, I met a porcupine on a narrow game trail. They are near-sighted creatures. I froze motionless until he was only a couple of feet away.

“Boo!”

He sprang straight into the air and, with surprising speed and agility, scaled a tree and peered down from a limb to locate the source of his discomfiture. I laughed and moved on.

The Yukon is a mighty river hugged by evergreen forests and snow-capped mountains. On one of the islands I startled a cow moose and her newborn. Mom growled a warning and I politely backed off.

During a sudden storm, I found myself trapped on a one-acre island with a grizzly. The griz took one end of the island, I took the other, and in this manner we rode out the tempest together.

A few afternoons later with the sun bobbing low and red above the western horizon, I pitched camp on a small sandy island overshadowed on the shore by a towering precipice. Suddenly, a pack of timber wolves silhouetted against the late sun began serenading me from the top of the precipice.

I relaxed and stretched out on my back next to the fire to enjoy a concert orchestrated by God’s creatures. Life is always good in the wilds.

Charles W. Sasser is author of more than 60 books and thousands of magazine articles in national magazines. He has traveled to every continent on earth except Anarctica.

A rusted barbed wire fence defined the border between Texas and Mexico. A Border Patrol officer told me that invaders swarmed over the fence into the United States like cockroaches as soon as the sun went down.

According to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, an uncounted number of foreign-born estimated as high as 38 million reside here illegally. Another 58.3 million have been granted asylum or legal status. That means more than 30 percent of the population inside the U.S. is not native born.

As a historian, I trekked our southern border, talking to ranchers, farmers, immigrants, as well as Border Patrol officials, and others to discover for myself the extent of illegals entering our country and their effect on American culture. A nation that does not protect its borders, I reflected while standing at the rusted barbed wire fence, is soon not a nation. Historically, “barbarians at the gate” have been a major factor in the decline of civilizations.

“During the collapse of Western Civilization the first time,” historian Victor Davis Hanson points out, “the Roman Empire could not or would not define their borders. . .So when people started coming from Northern Europe, (the Romans) thought. . . ‘We’re much more sophisticated that we will assimilate them quickly. . .’ ‘They’re coming because they want to be like us.’”

Wrong.

Out of naiveté, political correctness, ignorance, or perhaps some darker motive, American leaders and the political Progressive Left continue to welcome illegals with open arms at our borders, many of whom refuse to be assimilated. It is not uncommon to watch illegal immigrants on TV protesting, in foreign languages, for their “rights.”

A poll conducted by the Center for Immigration Studies found that over half of all immigration households—both illegal and legal—use at least one welfare program. Seventy five percent prefer bigger government with more services.

In addition, the Center for Security Policy reveals that 51 percent of U.S. Muslims seek sharia law over the U.S. Constitution. One in four believes “it is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam. Only 39 percent believe they should be subject to American courts. Sufi leader Sheikh Mahammad Kabbani testified before the U.S. State Department that Islam extremist ideology has taken over 80 percent of mosques in the U.S.

“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet if Islam,” declared Barack Obama when he was President and appeared before the United Nations.

You’ll be shot or beheaded if you do.

The 2016 DNC platform argued that U.S. borders are not open wide enough to ensure equal treatment for “all Americans—(Now get this)—regardless of immigration status.”

Today, the “melting pot” has become the dumping grounds. As with Rome’s barbarians, the “huddled masses” from the Third World are inside the gates of the world’s last chance for freedom—and are overwhelming and changing it.

Should I need a disclaimer against being a “racist,” be it known that I spent much of the 1980s in Latin America. I speak Spanish, I had a girlfriend in Honduras, and considered adopting two little children from Nicaragua fleeing from the communist Sandinistas and were in a UN refugee camp. In addition, I have traveled and lived with people in Europe, Asia, Africa, and other places.

Nature’s creatures seem to attack a certain 25-year-old outdoorsman every time he ventures into the wilds. Most recently, a shark nipped a hunk out of his leg while he was SCUBA diving in Hawaii. Before that, a rattlesnake bit him during a backpacking excursion. Then a bear padded up one night while he was sleeping in his tent and gnawed on his head.

I’ve trekked remote corners of the globe for more than 50 years, from rainforest Africa to the deserts of Egypt, from the Amazon River to the Arctic. I’ve chased a shark while SCUBA diving off Costa Rica for pirate treasure, snacked on rattlesnake several times, and chased bears from my campsite by stoning them. Not that I don’t also take other precautions against potentially aggressive wildlife.

I’m a bit particular about who or what gnaws on my head while I’m sleeping. Especially after I found myself trapped on an island in the Yukon River with a grizzly.

A few years ago I solo-kayaked the Inside Passage from Washington State to Alaska. I wore a full dive wetsuit against the icy salt water.

It’s wild country with tides up to 20 or 30 feet and temperate rainforest spilling out of the coastal mountains down to the sea. Whales and other sea mammals inhabit the water, while moose, deer and bear roam the woods.

After a few days wearing the wetsuit, I couldn’t but notice an odor so rank that deer a half-mile away threw up their heads, sniffed the wind, and bolted. That gave me an idea. A stink like that had to signal within a certain radius that the biggest, baddest creature in the forest was coming through,

I set up my smelly wetsuit as a watchman while I slept nights, a “Scare Bear.” I erected it in front of my tent with arms stretched in a threatening manner. I don’t think even chipmunks got within a hundred yards of it. One morning I discovered bear tracks ambling up the beach toward my camp. But then, suddenly, the tracks turned abruptly and went back the way they came. The bear must have gotten a whiff.

I slept in peace every night while my faithful Scare Bear kept vigil.

I’m wondering what you who have read my blogs think about this: It’s been suggested that I expand a bit on these little tales, put them in order, etc., and publish an adventure-travel book to be called MANY LIVES. Would you guys be interested in such a book?

Coming out from under anesthesia, still groggy, my first thought and exclamation was, “Have I been shot?”

After all, with my lifestyle, I could have been shot. Other than sutures and broken bones and wounds, I had never had surgery before, never even been ill except for once when I contacted chicken pox as a kid—and my hillbilly grandma shooed chickens over my head and cured that.

I was 74-years-old when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer that required a technique called cryosurgery. Doctors assured me I was the perfect candidate for it—in excellent health and in good physical shape. After all, I had just climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa and raced a bicycle 500 miles. I should be, in the surgeon’s words, “riding my bike and climbing mountains again” within three months.

That was eighteen months ago. It has been periodically Groundhog Day ever since, with pain and blood. Every time I think I’m recovering and regaining my former self—Groundhog Day!

I hiked into New Mexico’s mountains to study the Decalogue Stone, possibly a relic of the Ancient Israelis or Phoenicians. A couple of weeks later, back in a hospital emergency room. Complications not from the cancer, but from the surgery.

Dan Case and I traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, where the Mormons launched the greatest mass exodus to the West in U.S. history. Afterwards, Groundhog Day!

I flew to Israel. More bleeding and complications soon after I returned.

That is the way it continues. My health deteriorate as I undergo each new medical “procedure” to correct the surgery. I’ve lost weight, muscle tone, and energy. I rotate in and our of emergency rooms, hospitals, and doctors’ offices. I’ve gone from optimistic and robust to depressed, lethargic, almost fatalistic. Hope only goes so far.

I’ve gone from climbing the tallest freestanding mountain in Africa to barely able to climb off the sofa.

I might have been better off getting shot. After all, I recover a lot faster.

A PERSONAL NOTE TO READERS: Guys, I’m still writing, just much more laboriously. Please forgive me if I don’t respond as readily on social media or email; I’m sometimes too ill and in pain. But I’ll be back. I will be back. Until then, you might wish to check out some of my published books on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or in many bookstores. Thank all of you for your best wishes and prayers. Charles W. Sasser

A hefty lady from France came within a hair’s breadth of suffocating me to death on the summit of Mount Sinai in the desert where Moses and his people wandered for forty years seeking the “Promised Land.”

Donna Sue and I had linked up with a troupe of college students from Europe to camp-tour Egypt on the cheap. Mt. Horeb (Mt. Sinai) is located within 24,000 square miles of nothing except forbidding mountains and desert. This is the accepted site where Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.

Pilgrims to the mount commonly begin the exhausting trek near sundown from St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base in order to reach the summit to catch the sunrise over this ancient land of the Bible. Not long after my group set out on the climb, a Bedouin riding a camel fell in behind Donna Sue and me. We were selected, undoubtedly, because she and I were at least 30 years older than most of the students.

“Lady want ride camel, mister?” the Bedouin asked as night fell.

“No. Thank you.”

That went on for about an hour or so, the same question every three or four minutes. He was amazingly persistent, if nothing else.

“If he says that one more time,” I groused to Donna Sue, “I’m going to drag him off that camel and stuff him—“

Use your imagination as to where I intended to stuff him.

There was no more “lady want ride camel, mister?”

We reached the summit a couple of hours before sunrise. The moon was low and only a sliver, the rugged terrain illuminated mostly by starlight. I lay down on a large flat boulder to enjoy the night. I soon dozed off, stirring only when darkness seemed to suddenly blot out the sky.

A very large rear end was posed directly above my face, shifting about like that of a hen before she settles on her nest of eggs. I couldn’t resist. I shrieked at the top of my lungs, as though in fear of my life. The poor woman almost jumped off the top of Moses’ Mount.

She spoke French. Fluently and loudly.

Charles W. Sasser is author of more than 60 books that range from history, politics, and sociology to SciFi, adventure, travel, and other subjects, including one Romance novelette. He is rather challenged when it comes to social media—but his titles may be accessed on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and many bookstores.

Down-and-outers have always exerted a special appeal. Perhaps it is because I grew up so poor. I lived on Seattle’s “Skid Row”—and had my shoes stolen while I slept at a mission. I hopped freight trains all over the U.S. one summer to study the homeless—and unintentionally ended up in a national TV special on the “homeless.” As a cop, I brought a ragged street bum home for Thanksgiving—who got arrested the next day as a drunk.

In Jerusalem, beggars are a different lot. Most are elderly men supplementing their meager incomes by hitting up tourists in the Old Town for change. Little stooped men wearing traditional Hassidic garb and yarmulkes on their heads, sometimes chanting softly and holding out a hand.

It hard for me to resist. I placed money in a couple of hands, until I ran out of smaller denominations. I came upon an old man who made me think of St. Francis of Assisi, or a monk at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base of Egypt’s Mt. Sinai. I approached and placed a hand on his shoulder, squeezed, and patted his back.

“God bless you,” he responded.

There is a passage in Hassidic literature something to the effect that a beggar may be “the prophet Elijah in disguise visiting earth and the hearts of men to offer the reward of eternal life to those who treat him well.”

It makes one think.

Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self Governing, by Charles W. Sasser, continues to draw attention and comments: “Your fine book has so much history, so much thought, and was written in such an engaging way that. . .it was hard to put down. . . Thank you for your time and energy you have poured into this book. . .”

An otherwise insignificant incident on a New York subway reinforced my contention that the more people mass together the more hardened and indifferent they become to their fellow man.

I flew into “the Naked City” as a journalist to go undercover and write about Occupy Wall Street, the protest movement by the so-called “99 percent” against the wealthy “1 percent.” While riding a subway to Zuccotti Park, I was sitting toward the rear of the car when an elderly black woman stooped over a cane got on at a stop.

All seats were occupied. She stood in the aisle and was thrown about by the stop-and-go movement of the train, almost falling several times. Much younger and more able passengers remained seated and pretended not to notice her plight.

I rose from the back of the car and helped the little woman down the aisle to my vacated seat.

When she got off at her stop, I assisted her to the door where she turned and, with tears in her eyes, threw her arms around me as though no one in New York had ever offered her his seat before.

RECENT BOOKS BY CHARLES W. SASSER:

The Night Fighter. The biography of America’s amazing founder of the Navy SEALs and his long fight against terrorism.

Blood in The Hills. Bobby Maras’ account of the U.S. Marines’ bloody fighting in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh.

Six: Blood Brothers; and Six: End Game. Novelizations of the hit A&E History Channel miniseries SIX.

Crushing the Collective. Is America and Western Civilization declining—how and why?

I happened to be in Israel in December (2017) when President Trump announced the U.S. would officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Predictably, Palestinian protesters on the West Bank and in Gaza rioted, torching President Trump in effigy and setting fire to U.S. and Israeli flags.

Palestinians seek east Jerusalem as their capital, even though the Palestinian area as a political entity did not exist before the 1948 partition and Jerusalem as a Jewish capital dates back to King David.

For much of its modern history, Israelis have lived in a perpetual state of crisis, threat and violence. Terrorist attacks are almost a daily horror. Children sent off to school are instructed to take separate buses so that in the event of a terrorist attack the entire family of children will not be wiped out.

Palestinians claim to desire peace, but repeatedly state their goal is to “drive Jews into the sea.” To them, every inch of Israel is “occupied” Palestinian territory.

In 2000, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat launched another intifada during which over 1,000 Israeli civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered. Incidentally, Arafat received a Nobel Peace Prize. In response, Israel built a 400-mile-plus security barrier, including a “wall,” along its borders to prevent Palestinian terrorists from easily infiltrating into the country.

About five percent of the security fence consists of a 26-foot high concrete wall, the main purpose of which is to prevent terrorist sniper fire into urban areas such as Jerusalem and along the Trans-Israel Highway. The rest of the security fence is a multi-layered composite obstacle composed of a ditch, pyramid-shaped stacks of barbed wire, an intrusion-detection fence between the wire with sensors to warn of any incursion, and a smoothed strip of sand that runs parallel to the fence to detect footprints. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) patrol the entire length.

Before the fence, Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank were able to simply walk short distances into Israeli population centers to detonate suicide bombs. The number of suicide attacks has since dropped dramatically, although the number of attempts remains high. The Israel border is now considered the most secure in the world.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Abdullah Ramadan Shalah in an interview on Hizballah TV admitted the security fence was an important obstacle to terrorist organizations. Although he said terrorist groups remain fully intent on continuing operations, the “separation fence… is an obstacle to the resistance, and if it were not there the situation would be entirely different.”

The Israelis settled the question of whether or not a “wall” works. It does.

Author Charles w. Sasser takes a hard look at the U.S. immigration crisis in his latest book, Crushing The Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing. Available at most book stores, as well as on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Alaskan homesteader, big game guide, and old friend Les Cobb, a couple of his ranch hands, and I were wrangling a ramuda of eleven horses nearly 200 miles across the Alaskan wilderness to a moose hunting camp along the Yukon River. Nearly every day plagued us with drizzling rain, encounters with bears, and hordes of mosquitoes. One wet afternoon when the sun shone briefly, we built a fire on the banks of the Yukon and huddled around it to dry out. I lay down next to it in the sunshine to take a nap.

As I snoozed, the young hands, Bryan and Chet, thought it funny to erect a makeshift cross marking the site of my resting place. I slept on.

What Bryan and Chet didn’t realize was that I had taken “combat naps” under many unusual places and conditions. Donna Sue says I can literally sleep anywhere, anytime; she has clandestinely taken photos of me to prove it.

Some of my more unusual naps:

In the Garden of Gethsemane in Israel against the boll of an ancient olive tree;

In the boughs of a tree during an Army Special Forces mission;

With a team of sled dogs in the Arctic;

In the jungle next to El Camino de Los Muertos in Honduras during the Contra wars;

Next to a camel in Algeria, and in Egypt;

On top of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa;

Marooned with my sailboat on a deserted island in the Caribbean;

During a rainstorm while canoeing the Everglades;

Isolated on a spit of land at midnight while kayaking the Inside Passage to Alaska with a 20-foot tide rolling in;

On an island in the Yukon River with a grizzly;

On China Beach in Vietnam…

So, when Bryan and Chet nudged me awake on the Yukon River and waited to see my expression when I noticed what they had done, I merely yawned broadly and winked. Any nap in time will do, anywhere, anytime.

Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing is available at most bookstores, WND.com, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. My appearance on radio, YouTube and some TV programs are available for viewing on the Internet.

I rode to the Salvadoran war in one of those colorful Spanish busses with about twenty people spilling out onto its roof, hanging on for their lives, and a turkey in the aisle with its legs tied. I got off at Fourth Brigade in El Paraiso Province, an isolated station surrounded by hills and forest. My friend, Subteniente Jose Camino, was a platoon leader with the Fourth, with whom I would be patrolling for the next few days in search of communist guerrillas. Jose would be slain a few weeks later when communist insurrectionists launched an attack on Fourth Brigade headquarters.

As a periodista. I had been in and out of the revolutions in Central America for most of the decade. I possessed the right credentials for a freelance journalist. I was an ex-cop and had served as a Green Beret soldier for thirteen years in U.S. Army Special Forces.

While with Special Forces, I parachuted into Panama with my SF group. Insurgents were threatening the government. Along with my team commander and team sergeant, I donned a disguise and mingled with the rioters in Panama City. Fires reddened the skyline and the measured cadence of automatic weapons penetrated the night. Flyers and revolutionary posters appeared magically on walls and parked cars. It wasn’t difficult to determine their origin, considering they were peppered with familiar communist phrases like “Yanqui imperialism” and “capitalist oppressors.”

Indeed, communists and socialists have patience and never compromise. They hammer away at liberty and wait for years for the right opportunity. The United States in the 21st Century has become an example of their tenacity. The same communist placards and catch phrases that I saw in Central America now appear on U.S. university campuses and in American communities. Violence and rioting on campuses and in Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and other cities harken to those in San Salvador, Panama City, and Managua. As Camino was killed by communists, U.S. policemen here have been cut down by radical socialists of various ilk in a declared “war against cops.” During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an avowed Marxist was a Democratic primary candidate and garnered enough votes that he could have won the White House to continue to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

Jose Camino was right: They will never quit until the world, as President Ronald Reagan once remarked, slides into a thousand years of darkness.

Knowing the horror of the collectivist state, seeing how socialist nations such as the USSR always end in tyranny and ultimately in failure, why does humankind give up liberty so easily in order to continue down the Yellow Brick Road toward a speculative future utopia that has never been created on earth and, what’s more, can never be created?